Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (19 page)

 
          
A
faint sound through the silent house disturbed her meditation. Listening, she
heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the
landing. A light glanced under the door and vanished;
Charlotte
had passed Delia’s threshold on her way
downstairs.

 
          
Without
moving, Delia continued to listen. Perhaps the careful
Charlotte
had gone down to make sure that the front
door was not bolted, or that she had really covered up the fire. If that were
her object, her step would presently be heard returning. But no step sounded;
and it became gradually evident that
Charlotte
had gone down to wait for her daughter.
Why?

 
          
Delia’s
bedroom was at the front of the house. She stole across the heavy carpet, drew
aside the curtains and cautiously folded back the inner shutters. Below her lay
the empty square, white with moonlight, its tree-trunks patterned on a fresh
sprinkling of snow. The houses opposite slept in darkness; not a footfall broke
the white surface, not a wheel-track marred the brilliant street. Overhead a
heaven full of stars swam in the moonlight.

 
          
Of
the households around Gramercy Park Delia knew that only two others had gone to
the ball: the Petrus Vandergraves and their cousins the young Parmly Ralstons.
The Lucius Lannings had just entered on their three years of mourning for Mrs.
Lucius’s mother (it was hard on their daughter Kate, just eighteen, who would
be unable to “come out” till she was twenty-one); young Mrs. Marcy Mingott was
“expecting her third,” and consequently secluded from the public eye for nearly
a year; and the other denizens of the square belonged to the undifferentiated
and uninvited.

 
          
Delia
pressed her forehead against the pane. Before long carriages would turn the
corner, the sleeping square ring with hoof-beats, fresh laughter and young
farewells mount from the door-steps. But why was
Charlotte
waiting for her daughter downstairs in the
darkness?

 
          
The
Parisian clock struck one. Delia came back into the room, raked the fire,
picked up a shawl, and, wrapped in it, returned to her vigil. Ah, how old she
must have grown, that she should feel the cold at such a moment! It reminded
her of what the future held for her: neuralgia, rheumatism, stiffness,
accumulating infirmities. And never had she kept a moonlight watch with a
lover’s arms to warm her…

 
          
The
square still lay silent. Yet the ball must surely be ending: the gayest dances
did not last long after one in the morning, and the drive from
University Place
to
Gramercy
Park
was a short one. Delia leaned in the
embrasure and listened.

 
          
Hoof-beats,
muffled by the snow, sounded in
Irving Place
, and the Petrus Vandergraves’ family coach
drew up before the opposite house. The Vandergrave girls and their brother
sprang out and mounted the steps; then the coach stopped again a few doors
farther on, and the Parmly Ralstons, brought home by their cousins, descended
at their own door. The next carriage that rounded the corner must therefore be
the John Juniuses’, bringing Tina.

 
          
The
gilt clock struck half-past one. Delia wondered, knowing that young Delia, out
of regard for John Junius’s business hours, never stayed late at evening
parties. Doubtless Tina had delayed her; Mrs. Ralston felt a little annoyed
with Tina’s thoughtlessness in keeping her cousin up. But the feeling was swept
away by an immediate wave of sympathy. “We must go away somewhere, and lead
plain lives among plain people.” If Charlotte had carried out her threat—and
Delia knew she would hardly have spoken unless her resolve had been taken—it
might be that at that very moment poor Tina was dancing her last valse.

 
          
Another
quarter of an hour passed; then, just as the cold was finding a way through
Delia’s shawl, she saw two people turn into the deserted square from
Irving Place
. One was a young man in opera hat and ample
cloak. To his arm clung a figure so closely wrapped and muffled that, until the
corner light fell on it, Delia hesitated. After that, she wondered that she had
not at once recognized Tina’s dancing step, and her manner of tilting her head
a little sideways to look up at the person she was talking to.

 
          
Tina—Tina
and Lanning Halsey, walking home alone in the small hours from the Vandergrave
ball! Delia’s first thought was of an accident: the carriage might have broken
down, or else her daughter been taken ill and obliged to return home. But no;
in the latter case she would have sent the carriage on with Tina. And if there
had been an accident of any sort the young people would have been hastening to
apprise Mrs. Ralston; instead of which, through the bitter brilliant night,
they sauntered like lovers in a midsummer glade, and Tina’s thin slippers might
have been falling on daisies instead of snow.

 
          
Delia
began to tremble like a girl. In a flash she had the answer to a question which
had long been the subject of her secret conjectures. How did lovers like
Charlotte and Clement Spender contrive to
met
? What
Latmian solitude hid their clandestine joys? In the expose compact little
society to which they all belonged, how was it possible—literally—for such
encounters to take place? Delia would never have dared to put the question to
Charlotte
; there were moments when she almost preferred
not to know, not even hazard a guess. But now, at a glance, she understood. How
often Charlotte Lovell, staying alone in town with her infirm grandmother, must
have walked home from evening parties with Clement Spender, how often have let
herself and him into the darkened house in Mercer Street, where there was no
one to spy upon their coming but a deaf old lady and her aged servants, all
securely sleeping overhead! Delia, at the thought, saw the grim drawing-room
which had been their moonlit forest, the drawing-room into which old Mrs.
Lovell no longer descended, with its swathed chandelier and hard Empire sofas,
and the eyeless marble caryatids of the mantel; she pictured the shaft of
moonlight falling across the swans and garlands of the faded carpet, and in
that icy light two young figures in each other’s arms.

 
          
Yes:
it must have been some such memory that had roused
Charlotte
’s suspicions, excited her fears,
sent
her down in the darkness to confront the culprits.
Delia shivered at the irony of the confrontation. If Tina had but known! But to
Tina, of course,
Charlotte
was still what she had long since resolved to be: the image of prudish
spinsterhood. And Delia could imagine how quietly and decently the scene below
stairs would presently be enacted: no astonishment, no reproaches, no
insinuations, but a smiling and resolute ignoring of excuses.

 
          
“What,
Tina? You walked home with Lanning? You imprudent child—in this wet snow! Ah, I
see: Delia was worried about the baby, and ran off early, promising to send
back the carriage—and it never came? Well, my dear, I congratulate you on
finding Lanning to see you home…Yes—I sat up because I couldn’t for the life of
me remember whether you’d taken the latch-key—was there ever such a flighty old
aunt? But don’t tell
your
Mamma, dear, or she’d scold
me for being so forgetful, and for staying downstairs in the cold…You’re quite
sure you have the key? Ah, Lanning has it? Thank you, Lanning; so kind!
Goodnight—or one really ought to say, good morning.”

 
          
As
Delia reached this point in her mute representation of
Charlotte
’s monologue the front door slammed below,
and young Lanning Halsey walked slowly away across the square. Delia saw him
pause on the opposite pavement, look up at the house-front, and then turn
lingeringly away. His dismissal had taken exactly as long as Delia had
calculated it would. A moment later she saw a passing light under her door,
heard the starched rustle of
Charlotte
’s petticoats, and knew that mother and
daughter had reached their rooms.

 
          
Slowly,
with stiff motions, she began to undress, blew out her candles, and knelt by
her bedside, her face hidden.

 
          
  

 
          
Lying
awake till morning, Delia lived over every detail of the fateful day when she
had assumed the charge of
Charlotte
’s child. At the time she had been hardly more than a child herself, and
there had been no one for her to turn to, no one to fortify her resolution, or
to advise her how to put it into effect. Since then, the accumulated
experiences of twenty years ought to have prepared her for emergencies, and
taught her to advise others instead of seeking their guidance. But these years
of experience weighed down on her like chains binding her down to her narrow
plot of life; independent action struck her as more dangerous, less conceivable,
than when she had first ventured on it. There seemed to be so many more people
to “consider” now (“consider” was the Ralston word): her children, their
children, the families into which they had married. What would the Halseys say,
and what the Ralstons? Had she then become a Ralston through and through?

 
          
A
few hours later she sat in old Dr. Lanskell’s library, her eyes on his sooty
Smyrna
rug. For some years now Dr. Lanskell had no
longer practised: at most, he continued to go to a few old patients, and to
give consultations in “difficult” cases. But he remained a power in his former
kingdom, a sort of lay Pope or medical Elder to whom the patients he had once
healed of physical ills often returned for moral medicine. People were agreed
that Dr. Lanskell’s judgment was sound; but what secretly drew them to him was
the fact that, in the most totem-ridden of communities he was known not to be
afraid of anything.

 
          
Now,
as Delia sat and watched his massive silver-headed figure moving ponderously about
the room, between rows of medical books in calf bindings and the Dying
Gladiators and Young Augusteses of grateful patients, she already felt the
reassurance given by his mere bodily presence.

 
          
“You
see, when I first took Tina I didn’t perhaps consider sufficiently—”

 
          
The
Doctor halted behind his desk and brought his fist down on it with a genial
thump. “Thank goodness you didn’t! There are considerers enough in this town
without you, Delia Lovell.”

 
          
She
looked up quickly. “Why do you call me Delia Lovell?”

 
          
“Well,
because today I rather suspect you
are
,”
he rejoined astutely; and she met this with a wistful laugh.

 
          
“Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before—I mean, if I’d always been
a prudent deliberate Ralston it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.”

 
          
Dr.
Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the armchair behind his desk, and beamed at
her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as
nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”

 
          
She
pondered. “Of course I realize that if I adopt Tina—”

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
“Well,
people will say…” A deep blush rose to her throat, covered her cheeks and brow,
and ran like fire under her decently-parted hair.

 
          
He
nodded; “Yes.”

 
          
“Or
else—” the blush darkened—“that she’s Jims—”

 
          
Again
Dr. Lanskell nodded. “That’s what they’re more likely to think; and what’s the
harm if they do? I know Jim: he asked you no questions when you took the
child—but he knew whose she was.”